WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Misleading research is often
published in major medical journals and doctors are lending
their names to it, the editor of the Journal of the American
Medical Association said on Tuesday.

Doctors, regulators, publishers and others are all taking
money, information and small presents from pharmaceutical
companies and being influenced in the process, said Dr.
Catherine DeAngelis.

"It goes for all of us," DeAngelis, whose journal is
influential nationally and globally, said in a telephone
interview.

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Her journal, commonly known as JAMA, published a paper
accusing Merck and Co. of suppressing data that showed its
now-withdrawn pain drug Vioxx was harming patients, and saying
that academic researchers had lent credibility to the company's
allegedly manipulated research by putting their names on the
work.

Merck and the independent researchers have denied this and
say the journal is mistaken in this case.

But DeAngelis said there is a "gigantic" problem of drug
companies influencing doctors and patients. Her journal
presents the Merck case as a specific example of one facet of

the problem.

"We have given away our profession and we have got to take
it back," she said.

Drug companies spend millions of dollars on promotional
materials, from pens to prescription pads. They pay for doctors
to travel to seminars, often in exotic places, to learn about
drugs.

They set up elaborate booths at medical meetings and send
articulate drug representatives and "detailers" to pay personal
visits to doctors.

CAREFUL WATCHDOGS

"Physicians in private practice shouldn't even take a pen
from anybody, let alone pizza lunches or whatever," DeAngelis
said.

In addition, the companies fund many medical studies.
Government funds are usually only used for the first stages of
research -- the rest is left to companies who conduct studies
to seek licensing for various drugs. DeAngelis said there is no
way around this.

But, she added, "The editors (of medical journals) have to
be very, very careful watchdogs over what we publish."

The influence does not usually amount to outright bribery,
DeAngelis added. "We just have to be more careful, all of us,
and insist that we are not going to be hoodwinked by them,
fooled by them," she said.

"The physician should learn from other physicians, not from
some detail person," DeAngelis said.

The Consumers Union agreed.

"Pharmaceutical companies need to get out of the business
of 'ghostwriting' articles for medical journals," Dr. John
Santa, a medical consultant to Consumers Union, said in a
statement.

One of the studies in the journal shows that Merck
researchers mostly wrote one of the studies alleged to have
shown the higher risk of deaths but later added the names of
Alzheimer's experts Dr. Leon Thal of the University of
California, San Diego, and Steven Ferris of New York
University.

Ferris denies his name was simply pasted onto the study and
said he was involved in both the research and in writing the
article. "I am livid about it," he said in a telephone
interview.

Thal died in a plane crash in 2007 but was a prominent
Alzheimer's expert who would have been able to catch any errant
data showing a risk of deaths or stroke, Ferris added.

"We did participate in the study and we did participate in
the process of producing the final manuscript," Ferris said.